In just days, Americans will head to the polls to make a momentous choice for their next president. Their decision will have serious repercussions for a world in crisis. Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has escalated into a dangerous regional conflagration. Ukraine struggles to defend itself against Russian aggression. And world leaders continue to neglect the two things that threaten our species with extinction: the climate emergency and the peril of nuclear weapons.
Yet foreign policy has received remarkably little attention in this campaign. Kamala Harris has said little about her foreign policy plans. Donald Trump too has offered only hints of what he might do in a second stint in the Oval Office. He has promised, for example, to settle the war in Ukraine before taking office while offering no details of how he would do so. The war there has complex historical and geopolitical roots yet presumably it’s nothing that a diplomatic genius such as Trump couldn’t solve with a couple of phone calls.
It’s not as if world issues have no tangible effects on the lives of ordinary Americans. Extreme weather events devastate parts of the country each year. And Americans continue to spend an obscene amount of their tax dollars on its military: nearly a trillion dollars annually, which is more than is spent by the next nine countries combined. These resources could be invested in education, health, infrastructure, combating poverty or planning for a green transition. But the size of the military budget – and how it could be better spent on domestic priorities – has not been raised in a presidential campaign since 1972.
Given the urgent need to debate the role of the US in the world, the publication of these two books could not be more timely. Though coming from opposite sides of the political spectrum, Noam Chomsky and Paul Schroeder are leading critics of American foreign policy. Both were academics who became public intellectuals during the two most catastrophic American wars of the past century: Chomsky during the Vietnam War and Schroeder during the second Gulf War. Their writings remain essential starting points for those wishing to understand and critique American foreign policy today.
Chomsky charted an unusual path to becoming the best-known left-wing critic of his government. A lifelong anarchist, Chomsky wrote his first political essay – at the age of 10 – bemoaning Barcelona’s fall to Franco’s forces. But until the 1960s Chomsky was best known as a path-breaking linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He exploded on the scene as the war in Vietnam – and the mistruths used to justify it – escalated in the late 1960s.
Chomsky asserted a duty for all citizens to resist an unjust war and a special responsibility for intellectuals to “speak the truth and to expose lies”. Chomsky has since published dozens of books critical of American foreign policy. Today, at the age of 95, he is still at it.
Chomsky’s latest book is a collaboration with Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs. In neatly editing together several Chomsky essays and interviews, Robinson has created the most accessible and coherent introduction to Chomsky’s ideas. Chomsky’s virtues are in abundant evidence here. He writes with absolute clarity and a withering sarcasm. For example, he lambastes the current public image of George W Bush, architect of the horrific war on terror, as that “of a goofy grandpa, for whom even Democrats are nostalgic”.
Chomsky convincingly catalogues past and present US crimes. These are not limited to the obvious ones – Vietnam and Iraq – but to many less noted cases. Just to name one, during the Vietnam War the US made Laos – a country with which it was not at war – the most bombed country ever per capita, dropping a planeload of bombs on it an average of every eight minutes over the course of a decade. Unexploded bombs continue to ravage the country, with over 20,000 and counting maimed or killed since the bombing ended.
The Myth of American Idealism debunks how the US’s “violence is obscured through self-aggrandising mythology”, As Chomsky shows, though policymakers cloak their actions in high-minded language about democracy and human rights, their actual purpose has been to dominate the world economically and geopolitically. The US frequently flouts international law and world opinion. For example, the UN General Assembly annually passes a resolution calling on the US to lift its illegal blockade of Cuba. Typically, only Israel and the US vote against it. And yet American leaders routinely ignore it.
Reading Chomsky can be truly eye-opening for those unaware of what he reveals: facts that are rarely discussed in the mainstream American media or in its schools. However, for those already familiar with Chomsky, he can be predictable and simplistic. He claims that the US is no worse than any other state, only more powerful. Yet, while it makes sense American citizens should focus attention on the polices of their own government, does it not complicate his analysis if US policymakers have to respond to other states with their own, frequently hostile, motives?
Chomsky believes there is only one way to understand US foreign policy and that “an ordinary fifteen-year-old” could do so with a bit of effort. In fact, the US role in the world is complex. Its contours are up for debate even among reasonable people rightly horrified by many of the things the US does. Chomsky is perhaps best considered a gateway drug for critics of US foreign policy. Once readers have assimilated his main points, they will likely want to turn to more sophisticated critiques. To recognise this is not to diminish Chomsky’s heroic contributions to public discourse, which are possible only because he puts things in such simple terms. Moreover, however simplistic, Chomsky’s analysis is basically correct nine out of 10 times.
Those looking for more complex critiques, though, might turn to the writings of Paul Schroeder. Born in 1927, Schroeder had a distinguished career as a historian at the University of Illinois in Urbana. But at the age of 65, when most people are contemplating retirement, he started a second career as a critic of American foreign policy. His first piece criticised the first Gulf War, but he became best known for his challenges to Bush’s war on terror.
Schroeder demonstrated the value of a historical perspective to understanding current affairs. He debunked the bad historical analogies made by leaders: such as that the terrorist attack of 9/11 was akin to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And he suggested more fruitful new ones: such as that the way to combat international terrorism was not through war but rather by police actions of the kind conducted by 19th-century European statesmen.
Armed with a historical perspective, Schroeder was one of the most perceptive critics of Bush’s war on terror. He presciently warned of the “risks of victory” as the US chose to wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: wars easily won militarily but unwinnable in political terms. In over-reacting to the 9/11 attack, Schroeder argued, Bush gave Osama bin Laden the “war he wanted”, granting al-Qaeda a status it did not deserve and generating new recruits for it through gratuitous violence. As Schroeder put it in one of the brilliant metaphors that peppered his writing: “Trying to eliminate all the possible nests and sources of terrorism through military action is like trying to kill fleas with a hammer: it does more damage to oneself and the environment than to the fleas.”
Schroeder’s historical research had convinced him that leading states needed to choose hegemony over empire, binding themselves into a rules-based international system in which they acted as first among equals. By making pre-emptive war against Iraq, a nation that posed no military threat to the US and had not attacked it, the US violated international law and acted imperially.
Chomsky, however, would question whether the Bush administration truly marked a “fatal leap” toward imperialism for the US given its routine prior violations of international law, especially in the Global South. Schroeder, on the other hand, rightly shows that US policymakers are capable of making grave blunders as well as committing crimes. The war on terror and invasion of Iraq failed on their own terms and were not in American national interests, even narrowly conceived.
[ How to Be a Citizen by Cindy L Skach: Has too much law withered democracy?Opens in new window ]
Overall, there are some remarkable similarities between the analyses Chomsky and Schroeder given that the former is a libertarian anarchist and the latter a self-described “old-fashioned Burkean conservative”. That Schroeder’s critique resonates with the left is indicated by the fact that this posthumous collection of his essays is put out by the venerable left-wing publisher, Verso, and contains an introduction from Perry Anderson, a giant of the British New Left who is himself a very perceptive critic of US foreign policy.
Indeed, left-wing and conservative critiques of US foreign policy have been converging recently. In 2019, the Quincey Institute for Responsible Statecraft was founded, funded by the liberal George Soros and the arch-conservative Charles Koch.
The dangers that a second Trump administration pose for the world are obvious. But even should Harris win, there is plenty of cause for concern. There is no indication that she will break with American foreign policy traditions, least of all in the Middle East. Worryingly, she has solicited the support of prominent neoconservatives such as Dick Cheney. Regardless of who wins, Chomsky and Schroeder will be essential touchstones for a new generation of critics of the US role in the world.
Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott Associate Professor in American History at Trinity College Dublin
Further reading
After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed by Andrew Bacevich (2021). This book by the founder and director of the Quincey Institute for Responsible Statecraft offers an alternative vision for American foreign policy. It calls for overhauling conceptions of U.S. security and self-interest to confront 21st-century challenges such as the climate emergency.
American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers by Perry Anderson (2014). The leading British New Left historian masterfully examines and critiques how leading American thinkers and policymakers have conceptualised and shaped America’s role in the world since its emergence as a global superpower.
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (2007). Though published nearly two decades ago, this book offers a timely explanation for why the U.S. offers unconditional support for Israel even when doing so undermines U.S. national interests. While controversial, its dissection of the power of a bipartisan “Israel lobby” contains no hint of anti-Semitism.
